2018 Community Heritage Nominees

This category recognizes community-based volunteer organizations that are active in the city of Toronto. This award includes a cash prize to support the continued work of these organizations.

Heritage Toronto members in good standing as of Sunday, June 30, 2017, are eligible to vote on the Members’ Choice Community Heritage Award. In addition, your membership also grants you a discount on tickets to the Heritage Toronto Awards!

The voting deadline for the Members’ Choice Award is August 24th. Members will receive a ballot in the mail.

The Beach and East Toronto Historical Society looks to create interest in the history of Toronto’s East End. For over thirty years, it has achieved this through initiatives such as local lectures, publications, walking tours, and other creative programming. In 2015, the society formed the Heritage Conservation District Committee for an ongoing nomination of Queen Street East and the Beaches to be designated a Heritage Conservation District.

Collective City Arts is an organization generating discourse on Toronto’s art history and the future of art in the city. Its main project is a documentary series on the history of Toronto’s artist-generated galleries and collectives from the late 1980s to the present.

There have been seven films produced to date, documenting a movement led by artist collectives exhibiting their work in temporary spaces, eventually evolving into the sustainable artist galleries familiar today.

Ireland Park Foundation is a heritage organization dedicated to commemorating the history of Irish peoples in Canada and celebrating contemporary Irish culture. The foundation promotes artistic connectivity, original academic research, and hosts public art and cultural events throughout the year.

The foundation’s first project, the award-winning Ireland Park, memorialises Irish immigrants who died during the 1847 Irish Famine Migration.

Leaside Matters is a community advocacy group that works to preserve Leaside’s history and to foster stewardship of its future.

Focusing on the built environment, the group encourages conversations around physical changes in the community and how to retain place in the midst of change through panel discussions, walking tours, exhibits, collecting oral histories and municipal advocacy, among many other initiatives.

Rise Up! is a volunteer-led organization building a digital archive of feminist activism materials in Canada from the 1970s–90s. Since 2016, individuals as well as large organizations such as the Ontario Heritage Trust and the Canadian Museum of History have used the archive for their research.

The archive aspires to document more fully the diverse legacy of grassroots feminist organizing, including materials relating to racialized, indigenous, immigrant, lesbian women, and women with disabilities.